Sunday, October 26, 2008

Eli, the evil bunny has been busy sowing derision on some denialist sites, in a most polite way of course. Among other revelations is that the red queen had nothing on your average denialist

Alice laughed. `There's no use trying,' she said `one ca'n't believe impossible things.'

`I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. `When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Denialism is reduced to throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping that something sticks which leads to claiming that every one of a set of mutually contradictory papers are just wonderful. This came out again recently (at least when the Rabett was in attendance) in comments Open Mind. Down towards the bottom of the thread Ray Ladbury started it with

Dave A., Don’t be daft. Of course I form my own opinion of research in my field. I read the paper. I do the math. I look for consistency and how it fits into the context of previous research.

Eli agreed

Now the hooty thing about denialists is that they believe three impossible and mutually contradictory things before breakfast. Look at the nonsense that they simultaneously accept. They don’t care as long as it casts doubt on our understanding of climate.

and Gavin's Pussycat added

Many non-scientists have no clear idea of how highly rated redundancy is in science. You don’t really believe anything seriously before it has come from several independent sources. And those sources themselves are often internally redundant, like surface temperatures, monthly averaged, correlate over long distances.

Same with replication: I can replicate with the best of them someone else’s coding errors by running their code. Independent replication, by different people, using their own code and methods, on different data (if you can get it) proves something.

and Barton gave an example from virtual life

I can testify from personal experience that that’s true. I’m in a long running dialogue over on landshape.org where people are defending Miskolczi’s crackpot paper. One of them insists that the surface temperature of the Earth being higher than the radiative equilibrium temperature is caused by “stored energy,” not by the greenhouse effect. I pointed out that this would mean he’s disagreeing with Miskolczi, who at least believes there’s a greenhouse effect. Nothing doing. He says he didn’t see any conflict, and neither Miskolczi, who is also present on the thread, nor any of his supporters, was willing to correct this guy. “No enemies on the left.”

Eli has been pointing this out for a while now, and the reaction has been, welll......amusing

Eli you ought to hang your head in shame and embarrassment as a result of quoting the deplorable Krugman on economic matters.

And by the way the nonsense you spouted about the superiority of mitigation was a crock of shit proving that if you know so little about economics you shouldn’t be talking about AGW as your judgment on any matter should not be trusted.

As usual you peddle off at 50 MHP and won’t answer to all that stupidity you wrote.

We need an apology for your stupidity, Eli. Nothing less will do.

Of course we made sure that Krugman would win the Eco Nobel before replying, but what do you expect, the sucker can't spell Rabett either. The source of this exchange was cohenite playing Dave Letterman on Jen's rent a blog

The point here is not to show that cohenite's heart throbs are trash, you can read that elsewhere, but to point out that they contradict each other. You might believe one or two, but all ten at once is very red queen territory. The envelope please:

1. Steve McIntyre’s Ohio State University Address; How do we “know” that 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium? (May 16, 2008). http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/ohio.pdf. This is a seminal paper which synthesizes all the errors and obfuscations to do with the Hockey Stick. It also demonstrates McIntyre’s methodical, scientific and unadorned approach to the issue.

2. Craig Loehle’s paper; A 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-tree ring proxies, Energy & Environment 18(7-8): 1049-1058. 2007 http://www.ncasi.org/publications/Detail.aspx?id=3025 This paper was important because it was a counterpoise to Mann’s tree-ring data and provided good support for the Medieval Warming Period, a major obstacle to AGW.

4.Koutsoyiannis et al; http://www.itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/850 Assessment of the reliability of climate predictions based on comparisons with historical time series. Geophysical Research Abstracts, 2008. This link is to the first presentation. This was a crucial paper; it covered the 18 year predictive history of the GCM’s on a regional basis; regionalism is the Achilles Heel of AGW.

6. Misckolczi; Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary Atmospheres. Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service, Vol. 111, No. 1, January–March 2007, pp. 1–40.http://met.hu/doc/idojaras/vol111001_01.pdf This is my favourite. It has everything; the dead hand of AGW censorship, and the demolition of the AGW’s semi-infinite opaque layered atmosphere. People have quibbled about the Kirchhoff equations but Miskolczian –ve feedbacks have been established.

7. Essex, McKitrick, Andresen; Does a Global Temperature Exist? Journal of Non-EquilibriumThermodynamics, 32 (1) 1-27.http://www.reference-global.com/doi/abs/10.1515/JNETDY.2007.001?cookieSet=1 The fallacy of a global average temperature was taken to task in this paper, and, again, the reaction was hostile. This paper wittily compared averaging temperature to averaging the phone book; an important addition to the regionalism lexicon.

8. Spencer and Braswell; Potential Biases in Feedback Diagnosis from Observational Data: A simple Model Demonstration, Journal of Climate. http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F2008JCLI2253.1 No list would be complete without Mr Cloud and –ve feedback. As well, Spencer has been a bastion of reliable temperature data. This was still a close call. Minschwaner and Dessler’s paper on RH decline as a response to increasing CO2 is a crucial paper, conforming to Miskolczi’s feedbacks.

9. Chilingar; Cooling of Atmosphere Due to CO2 Emission, Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects. Volume 30, Issue 1, January 2008 , pages 1 - 9 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15567030701568727 An important paper about convective heat transfer which relegates CO2 radiative heating to its proper subordinate position; and incorporates atmospheric pressure as a heating factor. Thanks to Louis for alerting me to the paper. An honourable mention to the Gerlich and Tscheuschner paper on the fallacy of the greenhouse concept and a host of other errors AGW science makes.

10. Pielke Sr et al; Unresolved issues with the assessment of multidecadal global land surface temperature trends. Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol 112. 2007. http://climatesci.colorado.edu/publications/pdf/R-321.pdfAn elegant paper which uses Stefan-Boltzman to support regionalism and show that the notion of a radiative imbalance is defeated by regional temperature based energy differentials. Somewhat superfluous since AR4, FIG 1 shows no global radiative imbalance.

Eli torched this off by pointing out that Miskolczi and Chillingar are not even on the same planet. The former does some theoretical hocus pocus on radiative equilibrium in the atmosphere, the later claims that radiation plays only a small role and that almost all heat transport in the atmosphere takes place by convection.

Essex et al. claim that there is no meaningful global (or by the same arguments regional) temperature while almost all of the others calculate such metrics. Some of the papers claim there is no greenhouse effect, others claim there is a little bit, still others claim there is a greenhouse effect but it cannot increase (Miskolczi), and so on.

NT summed it up

You have missed the point. On this post(by Cohenite) he has used contradictory science to demonstrate that AGW is not real. You cannot use one paper to falsify one aspect, and then another paper to falsify another, when the two papers are mutually exclusive.

He attempted to show that the Greenhouse effect is negligable. He posted a paper he said showed why (Minschwaner), it contradicts earlier an earlier paper he posted (Miskolczi). one claims there is a greenhouse effect due to greenhouse gases, tthe other claims it is due to optical depth. You can’t have it both ways.

Skeptics use a scatter shot approach, using one kind of physics to ‘disprove’ one aspect and an opposing kind of physics to ‘disprove’ another. You need to have an internally consistent argument.

and SJT disagreed

“Skeptics use a scatter shot approach, using one kind of physics to ‘disprove’ one aspect and an opposing kind of physics to ‘disprove’ another. You need to have an internally consistent argument.”

As Jen's site demonstrates so well, you don’t need anything of the sort.

41 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Hey Rabett, thats pretty funny about mischief making activities. Now that Arctic ice is doing a screamer of a return, you and fellow faithwarmers are going to be scrambling about for your ten reasons before breakfast as to why it shouldn't happen, or Cryosphere is not correct, or ice is not ice if less than a Rabett's droppings thickness, etc etc,etc.

A Rabett that can't spell Sartre, and he seeking to catch out fellow non spellers. Ah, you're a funny guy Rabett.

At least the Libertarian AGW denialists (excuse the redundancy) are consistent in one regard: consistently (and spectacularly) wrong.

Speaking of which,Where have all the Libertarians gone?Long time passing.Where have all the Free-Marketeers gone? Long time ago.Where have all the Ayn Randers gone?Gone with Greenspan every one.When will they ever learn?When will they ever learn? (that 2 + 2 = 4)

I notice Marohasy's blog has had to add comment-paging now that the "discussion" on my "Proof of the Greenhouse Effect" article has reached close to 700 comments... What a waste of bits.

These guys not only have no trouble believing things that are mutually contradictory, they happily contradict themselves from one comment to the next. Read cohenite or Jan Pompe on those threads for example. Ah well, little point wasting more energy on it...

Claiming that there is no greenhouse effect is completely inconsistent with claiming that there is (no matter how small that effect might be). It is not simply a matter a degree. Either CO2 is a greenhouse gas or it isn't.

The range of values for sensitivity, on the other hand, is a reflection of the degree to which feedbacks enhance the greenhouse effect from CO2. Even the most skeptical of scientists (eg, Lindzen) acknowledge that the greenhouse effect is real.

That you think these two cases are similar says a great deal about your own misunderstanding of the issue.

Eli, I am flattered you quoted me, cheers.You may also want to look at Cohenite's top ten worst papers of all time... It's also amusing.Cohenite doesn't seem like a bad chap, however he is a lawyer (apparently) and does argue like one so for him it is enough that someone has written an opposing view. Apparently that is a "refutation". Maybe you could post on what a refutation is?

But people... it's so obvious that global warming is a scam because the mainstream media aren't talking about the 14,000,000 square kilometers of ice for 86,400 seconds a day and 7 days a week and besides don't you know that Al Gore is Fat?

Consistency? Who cares. If Chewbacca lives on Endor, then you just acquit!

Suggesting that Global Warming is caused by anything other than the decline in Pirates is HERESY against the FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER and you will be BURNED. Only FSM-ism can explain the recent decline in global warming - it's due to the escalation of PIRACY in SOMALIA. You can't ARGUE with the FACTS.

Good to see all you folks searching for global warming, 'cause you're not seeing it in that ice return.Hey bi, I don't think the Goricle small is fat, its just that he uses up the annual energy of nations to tell nations they shouldn't use energy. Normal folks might find that poor form.Normal and bi, now thats a combination that haven't crossed paths in a long time.

RP sr does not deny the reality of a human influence on climate, but in a recent interview with Mother Jones, RP Sr sure said some funny things:

Among them this: "for some reason, it [global warming] has stopped. And I don't understand the reasons why."

"MJ [Mother Jones interviewer]: I remember hearing that last year was the warmest year on record, and a few years before that was the warmest year on record. I hadn't heard that global warming has stopped.

"RAP [Pilke]: Josh Willis is one of the people I've worked with in the past, and he has a paper that came out recently that showed that at least since mid-2004, the upper oceans have not warmed."

The funniest thing about Pielke's comment that the warming has 'stopped' juxtaposed with his reference to Willis to bolster the claim is that if you follow the link to Josh Willis' blog on the JPL site, you find what Willis says about brief time spans "It's a sure bet"

"Random events happen in the atmosphere and oceans all the time. Not just the weather, but things like El Niño, La Niña and huge volcanic eruptions can make the planet warm up or cool down for years at time. There could even be a few others that we haven’t discovered yet.

Still, for all its short-term ups and downs Earth’s average temperature has risen dramatically over the last one hundred years. That’s no accident. Like the house edge at the roulette table, human-made greenhouse gasses have tilted the odds in favor of a warming planet" Josh Willis

"In terms of sea ice, if you look at Antarctic sea ice, it actually has been well above average, although in the last couple days it's close to average, but for about a year or longer, it's been well above average, and the Arctic sea ice is not as low as it was last year. So in the global context, the sea ice has been fairly close to average."

Well, practically speaking, the only time of year that means anything with regard to the long term trend is late summer, at the very end of the melt season.

And if you look at arctic sea ice area this year at that time (Sept), it was within a hairs breadth of where it was last year at its record low -- ie, well below the 1979-2000 average (by 2 million square km, or 40% below the long term average)

Sure, if you look at ice area in early March of this year (at the very peak of the winter freeze -- what JohnS refers to as last year's "recovery") it was just below the long term average.

But if that is what Pielke is talking about he is simply playing a silly game -- the same game that people like JohnS play.

If Pielke wishes to have his "arguments" sound like those of people like JohnS, that is his prerogative, i suppose.

Horatio, you're a bit off on your ditty about libertarians, free marketers, etc.

Most of these types are skeptical of government action, for the very good reason that the consequences are often negative (and shared widely over taxpayers or the uninfluential, while benefits accrue to insiders), but consistent ones will concede that man's activities may affect climate, that this may be a matter for concern and that currently there are no institutional mechanisms (property right in the atmosphere, liability rules, regulatons or the like) that make those who generate climate risks bear the cost of the risk.

There are some who will agree with the IPCC's case for AGW, but will note that agreement as to the existence of a problem is not agreement that a proposed solution will be efficacious or worth the costs.

I totally agree with you so far. But nobody has yet come up with a comprehensive solution to the problem. Some may be odd, but none are boring. And the ones that have a twist to them are very impressive.

Oddly, having read both papers carefully, I find that they are completely compatible with each other and show that whatever approach one takes to the AGW theory, it makes no sense at all; that is, that it is the AGW theory that is incoherent (as well as being contrary to ALL actual observations).

Thanks for reposting this excellent list. I've gone through D. Koutsoyiannis et al. and searched for refutations. None found, only the usual AGW True Believers ad hominem and meaningless doubletalk about the silly models. Perhaps you could post a link to a genuinely scientific refutation?

The arm chair climate experts over there are so deeply deluded that is absolutely impossible to make them see the real world. Granted it does seem amusing to tweak their nose from time to time.

Just remember that they are only about 7-16% of the population. (based on studies by Lieserowitz and Maibach. There have been several studies that show there is nothing that will change there minds because of a core distrust in science.

The cautious and disengaged are the ones who really need the attention. Most of that group will listen to reason.

I had actually forgotten about how Eli had quoted the participants at Open Mind and their discussion of the importance of "redundancy" by which they mean arriving at the same answer by multiple, largely independent lines of investigation. Or what sometimes gets referred to as the "consilience of arguments" that more often gets discussed in the context of evolutionary biology but which is of course applicable to all empirical science.

Looking up the term "consilience" I see Wikipedia referring to "the unity of knowledge ... literally a 'jumping together' of knowledge". An online dictionary refers to "The agreement of two or more inductions drawn from different sets of data; concurrence."

The "jumping together" brings to mind how the discoveries of science in paleogeography, geology, physics and the like came together like pieces in a puzzle, giving us a unified view of the world -- something that I have discussed before when presenting Duhem's Thesis, a critique of Karl Popper's principle of falsifiability where Duhem's Thesis actually preceded Popper's principle by roughly thirty years -- where Popper's principle essentially treats scientific theories as if they stand or fall independently of one-another and as if "falsification" is final -- with no room for auxiliary hypotheses.

The reference to the "unity of knowledge" brings to mind a principle attributed to Hegel -- "The true is the whole." Likewise it reminds me of Zen view that "The true Tao is that which cannot be spoken," by which they mean that the project of constructing our knowledge of reality is and always will be a work in progress. Looking back upon the unity of knowledge as a work in progress it seems that we already have a glimmer of the corrigibility of all empirical knowledge. That empirical justification is never absolute but always a matter of degree.

Likewise it seems that we can also see how much of what constituted earlier theories is in fact often preserved in later ones -- as is recognized by the correspondence principle as it gets applied to Newtonian mechanics and special relativity, Newtonian gravitational theory and general relativity, and classical physics and quantum mechanics. That the progress of science is at least as much a process of accumulation as an overturning of previous established theories.

And perhaps seeing how all of these views appear to be different threads in the same cloth we see the consilience of arguments at yet another level, in a dialog between different intellectual traditions and changing cultures that are part of the grand project of human civilization -- something that I have touched on before here when discussing the nature of dialog and civilization.

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they occasionally heed his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.